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[22]Identity
The movements that betray who you are
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(Credit: Alamy)
Germans count to three on their hands in a different way to the
British, using their thumb instead of three fingers (Credit: Alamy)
By Leo Benedictus14th September 2020
The accents that creep into the way we speak can reveal a lot about
where we are from, but there are also subtle clues visible in our faces
and the way we move.
W

While leafing through some old research papers, Hillary Elfenbein
noticed something strange about the photographs in one famous study.
The research from the late 1980s had asked volunteers if they were able
to [25]identify emotions in the faces of Japanese and Caucasian people.
Some of the “Japanese” faces were posed by Japanese-Americans, the rest
by Japanese nationals.

When Elfenbein herself looked at photographs, [26]she realised that she
could tell which were which. Her collaborator, Abby Marsh, found that
she could too. So they ran an experiment.

They found that the Americans they tested were also [27]strangely good
at spotting who was Japanese and who was Japanese-American, even though
they were all ethnically the same. The subjects wore the same clothes,
and were lit in the same way. When the two groups held neutral
expressions, people could barely differentiate between them. But when
they showed their feelings, especially sadness, something from
[28]Japan or America seemed to emerge.

You may have had this experience yourself, if you’ve ever been abroad
and felt suddenly convinced that a passing stranger is one of your
fellow countrymen. At times the signal may be obvious.
Australians wave apparently have a distinctive wave that means
Americans in one study were able to correctly identify them (Credit:
Alamy)

Australians wave apparently have a distinctive wave that means
Americans in one study were able to correctly identify them (Credit:
Alamy)

If you’ve seen the film Inglourious Basterds, you will know that German
and British people indicate the number three with their fingers in
different ways. (Germans raise their thumb and first two fingers;
Britons pin the little finger with their thumb and raise the rest.)
Most never realise that this difference exists until they see the
alternative, which, to them, looks strange.

Some signals may be random quirks that happened to catch on. Others may
have served a purpose. Vladimir Putin is said to [29]display his KGB
weapons training in the way he walks, with his “gun arm” hanging
motionless by his side.

Since their initial discovery, Marsh and Elfenbein have detected more
of these “non-verbal accents” – physical ways in which we show where we
come from without realising. Americans, for example, can spot
Australians from the [30]way they smile, wave or walk.

Even facial expressions during orgasm carry different “cultural accents”

“It was so easy to find,” says Marsh. “We ran those two studies, and we
found the same effect in both studies. In the behaviours that we looked
at, it was all right there.”

More recent research supports their findings. A team at the University
of Glasgow has now trained a computer to recognise and then generate
more than 60 different non-verbal accents on a simulated face. Subtle,
almost indecipherable differences in the way a nose wrinkles and a lip
is raised were often all that differentiated them. But when East Asians
were shown these artificial “East Asian” expressions, they
[31]recognised them much [32]more easily than “Western” ones. “It’s
harder than it sounds,” says Rachael Jack, whose lab conducted the
research. Before they could even begin, for instance, Jack and her team
had to establish which words in English and Chinese referred to roughly
corresponding feelings.

Although in principle, Jack says a robot should eventually be able to
simulate the tiny nuances for any culture, and any occasion, in the
world. In a study last year, Jack and others found that even facial
expressions during [33]orgasm carry different “cultural accents”.
We learn far more from the body position of tennis players after they
have played a point than from their faces (Credit: Alamy)

We learn far more from the body position of tennis players after they
have played a point than from their faces (Credit: Alamy)

The fact that non-verbal accents exist shouldn’t be that surprising.
People recognise individual voices and faces, and even walking or
running styles, without knowing exactly what makes them recognisable.
The Chinese technology company Watrix claims that their software can
[34]identify a person from footage of them walking, with accuracy of up
to 94%. If an individual’s movements can be so distinctive, then it is
not unreasonable to think that groups might share a few in common, and
that this might be noticeable to outsiders.

There is already evidence that we read more from body posture than we
realise. In a 2012 study, people who were shown photographs of tennis
players taken immediately after an important point were much better at
knowing whether the player had won or lost from images of their bodies
than of their faces. When losing faces were placed on winning bodies,
or vice versa, it was the [35]bodies that overwhelmingly guided
people’s judgements. A later version of the study produced the same
findings, along with the fact that Hong Kong college students [36]did
better overall when the athletes were East Asian, which again suggests
that we are better at spotting those postural accents that we are most
familiar with because we see them in the people around us.

You might also like:
* [37]What does your accent say about you?
* [38]The seven ways you are totally unique
* [39]Do you have a secret British accent?

In his recent book, The Human Swarm, biologist and photographer Mark
Moffett speculates that non-verbal accents serve as social markers,
which help people to tell “us” from “them”. Sometimes they seem to
carry more detailed information, not all of it reliable. In a classic
study, psychologists at Princeton University found that participants
were good at picking election winners just by [40]choosing who looked
more “capable” from a pair of photographs. Even children became good
political pundits when they were shown the same pictures and asked to
[41]choose an imaginary “captain” for a video game. Still, there
appears to be no connection between looking reliable, and being it.
The way we walk can be distinctive and can often betray information
about ourselves, such as with Vladimir Putin's "gunslinger" gait
(Credit: Alamy)

The way we walk can be distinctive and can often betray information
about ourselves, such as with Vladimir Putin's "gunslinger" gait
(Credit: Alamy)

On the other hand, some faces do seem to record information about the
life they’ve lived. When shown a selection of neutral expressions taken
from dating apps, participants in a 2017 study were able to [42]tell
rich people from poor more accurately than if they were just guessing.
Indeed they could still do it with pictures of only the person’s eyes
or, in particular, their mouth. After further investigation, the
researchers came to the conclusion that rich people just look a little
more attractive or more positive (a mixture of happy and likeable) than
poor people do. When shown photographs in which everybody was smiling
and looking deliberately positive, participants lost their ability to
tell rich and poor apart.

The presence of these subtle cues might help to explain the bias that
can creep into our thinking about people from different backgrounds. As
we’ve seen, non-verbal accents often have the effect of [43]making
outsiders more difficult to understand.

When people want to be understood, however, they do have ways to make
their feelings clear.

One ingenious but speculative recent study from the University of
Wisconsin-Madison suggests that this might even have given an upbeat
accent to modern Americans. The theory is that the residents of a place
experiencing high immigration will often struggle to understand each
other, but in order to cope in ordinary life they have to try. As a
result, the authors guessed that a lot of smiling and pantomiming of
emotions would have been required.

When they checked the available data, they found that people in
countries with “high ancestral diversity", including the US,
[44]reported smiling more often. Even looking state-by-state within the
US, the same pattern emerged. If outsiders seem cold and snooty to
Americans, and Americans seem inanely cheerful to everyone else, then
perhaps their diverging histories might explain why these stereotypes
evolved.

At the very least, when people really want to understand each other,
non-verbal accents show us that it’s good to talk.

--

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